Shira

by Agnon, S. Y.

  Herbst was still holding the glass of tea he had taken with him from the dining room and giving profound answers to the questions he was being asked. Finally, there were no further questions, and Herbst was asked to talk about whatever he liked. He sat talking. It was many years since he had lectured before such an audience, since he had been in the company of such youngsters. It was many years since Henrietta had heard Herbst lecture and since she had heard him say the sort of things he was saying here. On this night, these two things came together. Most important, she understood the lecture, which was not the case when Manfred began lecturing at the university. At that time, she still didn’t know a word of Hebrew. At many points during his talk, she had felt like stroking his hand. Now that she was sitting next to him, she took his hand and clasped it in hers, not letting go until they got up.

  Chapter twenty-four

  It was nearly midnight when Avraham-and-a-half and Heinz I accompanied the Herbsts to their room. Heinz I is Heinz the Berliner. The numeral I was appended to his name so he wouldn’t be confused with Heinz from Darmstadt, who became Heinz II. Avraham-and-a-half walked with Zahara’s mother, while Heinz I walked with Herbst. After a bit, they were joined by Heinz II and Marga – the Marga who had given Herbst the idea of lecturing on images of Byzantine women. Marga adds nothing to the story of Herbst and Shira. Her only relevance is that she had brought Herbst water and now gave Mrs. Herbst some sprigs of myrtle. She had planned to bring them in the morning, but Heinz II had said, “What you picked tonight, bring tonight; tomorrow you’ll bring more.” As she spoke, Marga was chewing a myrtle leaf. Herbst thought she was smoking a cigarette. Marga and Heinz were accompanied by Shomron, who always joined the night watch. Shomron was pleased with himself for having controlled the impulse to bark at Zahara’s retinue. He didn’t bark at them now either. But he would have liked to bark an inquiry: Why was everyone nodding at those people. Marga and Heinz had no effect on the Herbsts’ walking pattern. Henrietta continued to trail behind Avraham-and-a-half, and Heinz I walked with Manfred. Henrietta’s conversation was exclusively about Zahara and Dani, about the arrangements in the kvutza, which were ideal for babies but less than ideal for nursing mothers. Even had they been ideal for nursing mothers, they were not ideal for Zahara, who, though we wouldn’t call her weak, was nevertheless delicate. Abraham-and-a-half devoured every word uttered by Zahara’s mother, although he didn’t grasp its meaning. The more she talked, the more fond he became of the old lady who was so fond of Zahara, and his mind raced ahead: In a few years, when we’re really settled, we’ll build a parents’ house. We’ll invite Henrietta and Herbst to live with the other old people, and every day, in the evening, Dani will visit Grandpa and Grandma. He will come back and tell his friends that Grandpa and Grandma speak Yiddish to each other. How odd it is that Henrietta and Herbst, who take such pains with their speech and whose German is so literate, will be perceived by the local children as Yiddish speakers. Avraham was deep in thought and didn’t realize he was taking the Herbsts the long way around when he ought to be leading them directly to their room. It was already late, and they must be tired from their journey. Heinz and Marga weren’t paying attention to the route and noticed neither the Herbsts nor the fact that they had left them without saying goodbye.

  Heinz I was still engaged in conversation with Herbst, in the course of which he mentioned Saint Jerome and his Jewish teacher. So Herbst wouldn’t make the mistake of thinking he was an expert on the subject, he announced, “Everything I know about the Church Fathers I learned from a single lecture by Yohanan Levi. I once went to Jerusalem and up to Mount Scopus. I wanted to see the university. I soon found myself listening to a lecture on Saint Jerome.” “In any case,” Herbst said, “you have a good memory if you remember who his teacher was.” Heinz was quiet, offering no further comment. After a while, he said, “It’s not that my memory is good, but in the course of that lecture Yohanan Levi mentioned that Saint Jerome had misinterpreted a particular biblical verse and remarked that, for Jerome, that teacher was a poor investment. I only remembered Jerome and his Jewish teacher because of that joke.” Herbst said, “Nonetheless, you deserve praise. Because of a silly joke, you remembered what was essential.” Heinz said, “If you mean to praise me, I have to share the credit with Avraham, who was at the lecture too.” Herbst turned to Avraham and said, “I hear you go to lectures. I’m sorry to have missed the privilege of having you in my audience.” Avraham said, “I heard your entire lecture tonight.” Herbst said, “And is it unusual to hear an entire lecture? If you had left in the middle, Dani would accuse you of offending his grandfather. Yes, yes, I forgot – you don’t smoke, so I can’t compensate you for your time with a cigarette. But you, Heinz, surely you smoke? Not you either? Only the girls smoke here.” “The girls?” “Didn’t you notice that the one with Heinz ii was chewing on a butt? But let’s get back to our subject. So, you heard the entire lecture. Tell me this, my dear boy, how many grammatical errors did you find?” Avraham said, “I didn’t find any.” “But my accent is bad?” Avraham said, “An accent tells where you’re from. I can tell you’re from Berlin.” Henrietta said, “You’re not going to argue about accents at this hour?” Manfred said, “We’ve already begun.” Henrietta said, “In that case, stop.” Manfred said, “We’ve stopped.” Heinz said, “This is the place. You can sleep as late as you like. You won’t be disturbed by noise. The person who built this house loved to sleep. He picked a spot on a hill, with no neighbors. If you leave the lights off, even the sand flies will leave you alone. You don’t have to worry about mosquitoes. The windows are well screened, but nothing keeps the sand flies out.” Avraham said, “Since I came to this country, I’ve been hearing about sand flies. I think it’s all a fairy tale.” “A fairy tale?” Avraham said, “In the old days, people were afraid of giants. Now they’re afraid of sand flies.” Henrietta looked at Avraham fondly and said to her husband, “Fred, isn’t it a pleasure to hear such conversation? Tell me, Avraham, haven’t you ever been bitten by a fly?” Avraham said, “Not by a fly, not by a mosquito, not by a scorpion, not by any of those mythical creatures we hear so much about. Why should they sting me? Do I occupy their space? There is room in this country for me and for them.” Heinz said, “Now I understand why you didn’t join us last weekend when we were clearing away the stones in order to get rid of the scorpions.” “Last weekend? I wasn’t here last weekend. I went to Afula to bring Dan and Zahara back.” Herbst said to Avraham, “Didn’t you ever suffer from mosquitoes?” Avraham said, “Yes, of course. One summer they made my vacation so miserable that I gave up and ran away.” “You ran away? Where did you run to?” “To my mother and father in Berlin.” “Berlin? Where were you?” “In Karlsruhe. I had an aunt there, a special aunt, who invited me to spend my vacation in Karlsruhe. I was happier than I had ever been about any aunt, because I was told that my Karlsruhe cousins were going to act out the Karl May stories we used to read. When the vacation began, I went to Karlsruhe. I was attacked by mosquitoes and stung until my hands and face were like sieves. It was impossible to stay outside because of the mosquitoes. Not only was I unable to join in the play, but I couldn’t even walk in the park with my cousins because of the mosquitoes. Yes, they had window screens there.” Heinz said to the Herbsts, “Even though Avraham denies the existence of sand flies, you should be careful. If you can’t get undressed without light, be sure you turn it off immediately, before the sand flies notice. The moon is bright, and there’s actually no need to turn on the light.”

  It was nearly midnight when they brought the Herbsts to the house in which they were going to spend the night. It was set on a hill at the edge of the village, away from the other houses, and had two rooms, one an infirmary, the other for the nurse. It had been built by the engineer who planned the kvutza, for himself and his new wife, with the idea that they would come for weekends and vacations. He didn’t spend much time there, so he sold it to the National Fund. The National Fund gave it to
the kvutza, and it served as an infirmary, as well as a place for the nurse to live. The house was sold because of something that happened. The engineer and his wife were once on their way to Ahinoam, looking forward to a quiet and pleasant Shabbat. They met up with an Englishman, a government official whose car had broken down on the road. They offered him a ride. He accepted. The engineer invited the Englishman to stop in Ahinoam and have tea with him and his wife. He agreed to join them. Over tea, he told his hosts that he had been living in the country for six years and had never been invited to anyone’s home. The engineer said to his wife, “We ought to make up for all those years of loneliness.” The woman said, “We’ll do our best.” The Englishman spent all of Shabbat, as well as the following day, in the engineer’s house, and his hosts did their best to make his stay pleasant. He grew fond of them and became a frequent caller, almost a member of the household. One day the woman said to the Englishman, “I’m tired of this deception. Rather than cheat on my husband, I’m going to move in with you, and we can always be together.” The woman left her husband’s house and went to live with her lover. The engineer began to detest his country house. He sold it to the National Fund, and it was passed on to the kvutza. That night, it was unoccupied. The nurse who lived there had gone to Jerusalem in the morning, to see the psychiatrist Dr. Heinz Hermann about a young woman who had been attacked by an Arab shepherd and was in emotional shock. Herbst didn’t know that the quarters he and his wife were occupying belonged to the nurse he had met at Shira’s. It’s good that he didn’t know. Had he known, he would have been afraid Zahara would discover that the nurse knew him and that they had met at Shira’s. One further detail: when the nurse returned to the village and heard that Dr. Herbst had stayed in her room, she said, “I’m sorry I missed his lecture,” but she didn’t mention the fact that she knew him.

  Zahara hadn’t informed anyone that her parents were used to sleeping in separate rooms. The two of them were given one room, the nurse’s room. The infirmary couch was brought in, and the two beds were set up side by side. The Herbsts came into the room. The scent of flowers, along with that of fresh linens, conveyed the fact that these were welcome guests. Henrietta put down the myrtle, undressed, took the flowers out of the room, got into bed, said good night to Manfred, lowered her eyelids, and succumbed to sleep.

  Manfred found it odd to be sleeping in the same room as Henrietta, which he hadn’t done for many years. From the time she became pregnant with Sarah, they hadn’t slept in the same room even once. Now, all of a sudden, they were in the same room, and their beds were so close they were within arm’s reach of one another. Henrietta paid no attention. As soon as she got into bed, she dozed off, and, now that she was covered by the light blanket Zahara had brought her, she succumbed to the deep sleep decreed by the day’s activities.

  Fearing the sand flies, Herbst went to bed without light and without a book. Since his return from the war, he would never lie down without a book. Even in bad times, during the unrest that followed the war – when municipal lighting, both gas and electric, was suspended – he had read by a small candle or a carbide lamp. Here, he lit neither a candle nor a lamp. For a time, the moon lit up the window and shone into the room. It vanished, appeared, vanished, and didn’t appear again. It may have reappeared after he dozed off. Anyway, he wasn’t asleep now. He was very alert, because of the fresh air, because of the lecture, because of his conversations. The lecture was a success. It wasn’t new; he had given the same lecture when he was first appointed to the university. But new elements were introduced tonight. As he presented new insights, many eyes shone responsively, unlike that first night, when the evil eye lurked everywhere, awaiting his downfall. Not that he had been usurping anyone or that there were other candidates for his position, a position that was created for him because of Professor Neu. But the primal law holds; for every Abel there is a Cain, if not to commit actual murder, then to invoke the evil eye that destroys one’s spirit. Another thing about the lecture in Ahinoam; it was spoken rather than read.

  Herbst lay in bed recalling the people who had been in his audience this evening. Herbst was attached to his university students, knew each one of them, with their particular spiritual qualities, and was fond of them, perhaps more than they realized. But how many were they? Five or six a semester. Here in Ahinoam, fifty or sixty young men and women came to his lecture, healthy, vigorous, lively. And that Byzantine girl – if I were going to add pictures to my book, hers would be the first. All of these youngsters, males and females alike, invest their youth, designed for joy and pleasure, in work and drudgery. They sacrifice much-needed sleep to hear a scholarly lecture on a subject remote from their lives. As for me – the lecturer, for whom scholarship is, presumably, the axis of life – I waste my time on…Lo and behold, what he failed to do on all other nights, he succeeded in doing on this night. He took charge of his thoughts and did not dwell on Shira.

  That night, as was always the case when his mind was stimulated by work, he resolved to devote all his energies to completing his book, fortifying his conclusions, leaving no grounds for the charge that the author was inventive but unconvincing. Convincing, convincing…Who invented that ugly word, and what is it doing in a scholarly context? Are we political agitators? Scholarship involves going with the data. Whatever conclusions this forces upon us, we are required to present them without equivocating, even if they are contrary to what we had in mind. I don’t specialize in the Hasmonean period, but, if I were to deal with it, I would conclude that much of what Antiochus demanded of the Jews, the Hasmonean kings did willingly. And I wouldn’t hesitate to make this fact public, although it detracts from our glory, demonstrating that, given the chance, we behave like any other nation. Similarly, if I were to write a book about national character, I wouldn’t hesitate to generalize about Jews, to declare that it isn’t a state and political life that Jews are after, but the opportunity to serve God and support themselves. Which is what Mattathias and his sons were after when they were pressed to violate the rules of their religion. When the Hasmonean kings behaved corruptly, many leaders in Jerusalem chose to give up the kingdom and beseeched Pompey to protect them from the rule of the Hasmoneans. I know that such ideas are a challenge to Zionism, and Zionism has, after all, saved my life and brought me here, at a time when so many fine and prominent individuals are in mortal danger. I am repaying a good turn with a bad one. But those who engage in scholarship value it, and we must stand by its truths. As for my book, I must get back to work and finish it. Should new material fall into my hands, it would be wise to ignore it. It is sometimes better to close one eye than to add material that pretends to add to the substance but merely doubles the bulk.

  Herbst lay in his bed reviewing his manuscript. He undertook this review to determine what to highlight and what to play down, in the interest of completing the book and preparing himself for a new project. It was not yet clear to him what it would be, but he had a sense of it, as though he were already collecting material.

  So as not to interfere with his sleep, he began thinking about a simple aspect of the work: how to set up a new box for his new notes. Even if he completes his large work, the boxes won’t be empty. Those boxes are amazing; though he takes out endless notes for colleagues, students, or minor articles of his own, they always fill up again. When your soul is fixed on a particular idea, you discover it in everything, and, in this process, new notes are constantly created. That night, he decided to abandon the tragedy he had intended to write about the Byzantine woman of the court, the nobleman Yohanan, and Basileios, the faithful servant, which I have described in preceding chapters. Even, before this night, Herbst had begun to suspect that he had nothing to contribute; that, even if he were to make a great effort, he wouldn’t accomplish very much; that whatever he might achieve would be so slight that it would not approach even the tiniest fraction of what Gerhart Hauptmann achieved in Heinrich the Unfortunate, his dramatization of a superb story. Herbst was not pres
umptuous. He had no illusions about himself as a visionary. Not in his wildest imagination did he compare himself to such a famous poet. But, having given up the idea of composing a tragedy, he began analyzing the work of various authors and ended with Gerhart Hauptmann and his play Heinrich the Unfortunate.

  Once he decided to give up the tragedy, he felt a surge of relief and lightness. From now on, his time was his own. He was free to pursue his interests and devote himself to his current book, as he had done when writing the first one. Actually, there was a big difference between the two. One was written in German, a language with thousands of volumes on the subject, while the other was to be written in Hebrew, in which there was not a single pamphlet on the subject. His first book was written in a language with standard, set, accepted terminology, whereas Hebrew possesses no standard terminology, and scholarly writers must improvise, translating or creating terms from scratch. Either way, they struggle and waste time on something a living language simply provides, demanding no effort. Herbst was pleased to be writing in Hebrew, rather than in one of the languages of the world, though those languages promote an author’s name. And he was pleased to be repaying a debt to the language in which he now lectured, at a time when many far more distinguished scholars were being deprived of their posts and were in mortal danger.

  From the bed opposite his couch, he could hear Henrietta’s breathing. Her breaths were even and regular. Three long ones and one short one, one short one and three long ones, each breath timed to fit in with the others. Even in her sleep, she wasn’t undisciplined. A woman who is orderly when awake is orderly when asleep. He turned toward her and told himself: Those old bones need rest. Let her sleep. She’s tired, she’s tired from the trip. She was so alert on the way. She noticed every mountain, hill, and forest, every snip of cloud, each bird and grasshopper – everything that crossed the road, man as well as beast, not to mention grasses and flowers. Her eyes soaked up the colors of every blossom. If I were to draw an intelligent woman, one whose vitality has not been diminished by the years, I would draw Henrietta as she was when she sat in the dining room with those girls. Henrietta sat among them like a mother with daughters awaiting her in many different places, with such intense anticipation that their places can no longer contain them, so they come together, and, as soon as she arrives, they swarm around her, fixing their eyes on her lips as she tells each one what she wants to know. This is how it was with Henrietta and those girls: until she spoke, they didn’t know what they were after. When she spoke, they knew she was saying what they wanted to hear. More than surprises or miracles, the heart needs answers to unformed questions.